I'm really happy to read this though, shows you how this shit should be handled:

"We took immediate steps to protect our patients by removing him from patient care duties the day we were alerted. We did not allow him to return to work and he is no longer a Michigan Medicine employee. We also immediately reported him to law enforcement"

"Hoeltzel first got into trouble in 2004 after exchanging flirtatious social media messages with an 11-year-old girl he'd examined at a U of M arthritis camp. The hospital sent Hoeltzel to what they called a "boundaries course" as a result."

Yes, back in 2004 he sent inappropriate texts and they sent him to a course about boundaries, pretty standard treatment back then. But the minute they learned about this second infraction, he was gone. Maybe more comes out about it and how Michigan failed to handle them, but thus far no evidence and it's been some time since he lost his license.

However, there is a substantial distinction between this doctor and all of the issues with the athletic departments at PSU and MSU. This doctor had no affiliation the the athletic department. There was no cover up by the athetlic department or university. Student athletes were not involved. This was an isolated issue. This was dealt with appropriately. These are not even close to 'apples to apples' comparisons. Correct me if I am wrong (many have been here for >10 years), but this is a sports fan website, right?! This doctor has nothing to do with sports! (except he was at a university that excels its competitiion in EL in nearly every category - athletic and academic, so perhaps the post does have some indirect emotional relationship to sports given the poster's feelings about UM and MSU?)

Large organizations will have perverts, domestic abusers, rapists, murderers, etc. That's what happens when you employ thousands and thousands of people. Michigan, rightly, fired the guy as soon as it learned what was going on.

problem is that if/when calls for "death" from and by the masses for unacceptable behavior become a real-life thing, and not merely an on-line phenomenon, it is not going to seem out-of-place. It will feel engrained in our culture already and the mechanisms we rely upon for civility may not engage.

I agree with this, and not just re: calling for "death" for various criminals. Our nation has lived in relative peace for 70+ years and our culture has forgotten what the real consequences of some of the heated rhetoric now traded like baseball cards between various tribes can be.

Thus far our culture and structure have insulated us from any real problems. Despite frenzied complaining from all sides stretching now through at least the past three presidencies that the president will refuse to step down following the end of his term(s) we continue to have peaceful and uneventful transitions of power. Despite dark rumblings suggesting death camps are right around the corner if the enemy tribe seizes or remains in control, despite wild suggestions that massive and violent censorship backed by a partisan gestapo are only a step away, no such thing has happened. Our systems are robust and tend to be self-correcting.

But it may not remain so forever. Dehumanize someone enough and you may find that people start taking such language seriously and actually treat people less than human. Call for "death" and sooner or later people may start taking it seriously. Call fellow citizens the enemy and people may start fighting like they are.

I agree with you to a certain extent. But relying on the robustness of our systems has never been the norm. All additions to the robustness has been hard-won.

Americans have had to earn it many times over. And they didn’t earn it by relying on the system to self-correct; they took to the streets and the courts and the ballot boxes to make the changes. They forced the system to correct.

Waiting on the systems to kick in led to Jim Crow and Japanese internment. The system needs to constantly be jump-started. It’s not really self-correcting at all.

I'm not arguing that we should rely on things and everything will be ok; I've expressed concern that the current status quo won't last. I was saying that so far our current climate hasn't degraded to the point that large quantities of people are actually acting on the rhetoric.

If things go seriously awry, any restoration to the "norms" will once again have to be hard-won.

smoke show...look see...it's not just MSU, even the good school has problems. Actually pretty pathetic. Yep, UM has it's share of problematic employees...UM takes care of it, and MSU/other schools just try to keep their image looking good regardless of victims.

What exactly did he do the first time that was perverted? If he sent facebook messages saying, "It was nice seeing you, hope you are having a good day. I'm here if you ever want to talk." That's very odd, alarming and innapropriate (flirtatious) for a patient/Dr. relationship but it's not quite perverted.

I would hope that if it was anything sexually perverted at all, U of M did everything in their power to end his access to minors and immediately reported it to authorities. If they didn't, then I hope that gets exposed as well.

Aside from the fact that this has already been thoroughly discussed -- Can't wait for the next 50 years of SOMEONE WITH SOME CONNECTION TO EITHER MSU OR MICHIGAN HAS BEEN CHARGED WITH A CRIME AGAINST CHILDREN -- just let it be already.